Word: legman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Rex Todhunter Stout, 88, premier American whodunit writer, whose corpulent orchidologist-detective, Nero Wolfe, with the help of his faithful legman Archie Goodwin, solved crimes in 46 books that were translated into 22 languages and sold more than 45 million copies; at his home in Danbury, Conn. As sinewy and energetic as his protagonist was fat and lethargic, Stout would work out the story line for such mystery novels as The Doorbell Rang and Too Many Cooks while puttering about his daily cooking or gardening chores, then sit down and type out a complete mystery in 38 days...
...LAUGHING MATTER: RATIONALE OF THE DIRTY JOKE, 2ND SERIES by G. LEGMAN 992 pages. Breaking Point...
These jokes, plus 2,000 others, plus answers to questions most readers have never dared to consider, can be found in Gershon Legman's obsessive-and useful-collection of sexual and scatological humor. The first 811-page volume by the world's leading scholar on the subject was published in 1968 (Grove Press). Bound in nursery-blue covers, the book is suitable for mixed company. Volume II is clad in outhouse brown and concentrates on what Legman calls the "nasty nasties," divided under the headings Homosexuality, Prostitution, Sex and Money, Disease and Disgust, Castration, Dysphemism and Insults...
Libidinous Filth. Out of their locker-room context, where hidden anxieties and hostilities trip the giggle reflex, the jokes are not at all funny. Even to Legman they are shocking. "The book is full of material so disgusting that it will make any decent, clean, healthy person want to throw up," he declares. Why then did he spend 41 years collecting and writing the text that accompanies these Augean sweepings of the human psyche? Legman tells us that he began his harvest as a teen-ager in Scranton, Pa., where he was born in 1918. "I got myself...
...editor of Neurotica, a daring little Freudian quarterly of the late '40s. Legman published his polemical essays attacking violence in comic books. He was an early critic of censorship that allows children to watch dramatizations of murder and mayhem but prevents them from seeing people making love. Lenny Bruce frequently goaded his nightclub audiences with the same point. Legman, never one to be upstaged by a comic, now claims authorship of the slogan "Make Love...